‘Get­ting re­ally, re­ally well paid’

There were some GAA head­lines that made us scratch our head this week (“Joe Brolly: ‘No­body craves the spot­light more than Davy Fitzger­ald’” was a favourite) but one jumped off the page or, more ac­cu­rately, the mon­i­tor. “Man­agers need to start get­ting paid, says Martin McHugh” was in­deed a clas­sic of the genre

As far back as 2000, then-GAA pres­i­dent Seán McCague sug­gested that more than half of man­agers were be­ing paid in ex­cess of what the as­so­ci­a­tion al­lows for in ex­penses. In 2009, pres­i­dent Nickey Bren­nan de­scribed the prac­tice as “an epi­demic”. McCague took the step of ap­point­ing a com­mit­tee to look at the whole area, headed by Peter Quinn, who wryly claimed when asked about ‘un­der-the-ta­ble’ pay­ments that he “couldn’t find the ta­ble, let alone the pay­ments”. Then again, maybe the head­line mis­rep­re­sented McHugh’s com­ments. He didn’t say it wasn’t go­ing on as it is. “I re­ally feel that an in­ter-county man­ager, un­less he’s get­ting re­ally, re­ally well paid for it, I don’t think it’s worth it,” he said. So, was that a tacit ad­mis­sion that some man­agers are “get­ting re­ally, re­ally well paid”?